Is Google pushing things out too fast?

I spend the day trying to get some of Hungry Critic’s reviews into Google Base. It wasn’t the most fun. I would consider this more of an alpha than a beta quality product. Some strange things – instead of limited documentation, there is too much inconsistent documentation. The help section has a ton of examples but overall lack consistency. I think they might have been better served keeping things simple – by offering a few quality examples. I think they spent more time on the interface that user’s use to input single items, not the bulk uploads section. If you are doing bulk uploads, you might want to stick to the tab delimited format. I think their XML parser is a “bit” buggy. Time will tell, but overall this concept is really interesting.

While I’m on the topic of Google, I’ve been playing around with Google Analytics for a few days. Nice UI, rich information, and free! However, it looks like the service got too popular too fast and my reports are slow in coming. I’ve only gotten one so far (they say it updates every 6 hours or so). Perhaps they should have rolled this out as a beta first? They could have offered it to some/all of their AdWords customers first to test their load, etc.

I still love the great products Google has brought to market but I wonder if they are pushing things a little too fast?

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eGoh (Eric Goh) - Technology entrepreneur, product management professional, fountain of esoteric knowledge. Currently located in Austin, TX but New York, Boston, and San Francisco will always have a place in his heart.